Engineers build railroads and are largely represented in their management, but both in building and operating them they are dependent, at one time or another, upon some kind of police protection. Indeed, there are railroads that could not have been constructed at all without the aid of either soldiers or policemen. The Trans-Caspian railroad was built largely by soldiers, and is still superintended by the war department at St. Petersburg rather than by the minister of ways of communication. The Siberian line is, in parts, the result of the work of convicts, who were carefully watched by police guards, and the Russian civil engineers in Manchuria have needed the protection of Cossacks merely to survey that end of the road. In Germany, practically all the railroad officials, from the head of the engineering department down to the track-walkers, have police power. The conductor of a train, for instance, can put an obstreperous passenger under arrest without waiting until a station is reached, and resistance to him is as serious an offence as is resistance to the ordinary _Schutzmann_. In Europe, it was seen, when railroads were first coming into use, that police efficiency, as well as that of the technical railroader, would be required, if the properties were to be well managed, and it was secured at the start. Before the railroads were built it had been made plain, after long experience, that even on the public turnpikes policemen were indispensable, and the authorities decided to employ them on railroads as well. The protection of life and property is a very serious matter in Europe, where precautions are taken which in the United States would seem superfluous. It avails nothing in Germany, for example, for a director of a company to excuse the loss of money intrusted to his care on the ground that he thought he was acting in a businesslike manner. Inspectors, or commissioners, are appointed to see whether his transactions come up to the standard of what is considered businesslike, and if they find that he has not exercised good judgment, although there may have been nothing intrinsically dishonest in the way he has managed, his bondsmen frequently have to reimburse the stockholders for the loss that his mistakes have brought upon them. It is the spirit of carefulness behind such a precaution as this which goes to explain why the Germans have the systematised police surveillance of railroad property referred to. Much of this surveillance is in the hands of the municipal police and rural constabulary, but the fact that the majority of the railroad officials have police authority shows how much protection was considered necessary to manage the properties carefully.